| Sighting Report |
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| Occurred : 3/4/2004 21:30 (Entered as : 03/04/2004 21:30) Reported: 3/29/2004 12:07:36 PM 12:07 Posted: 3/29/2004 Location: Goodlettsville, TN Shape: Light Duration:1 minute |
| Large, brilliant 'flashlight' arced "off". We were leaving the house for a short time. My wife was putting our daughter in the child seat and I had walked around to the opposite side of our car. The night sky was fairly clear and I always enjoy checking out the stars, whenever possible. I happened to look up, wanting to catch some of the nearby planets (that are in good view right now) and stars. I noticed an unusually large light (about the size of a small pea, at arm's length) shining VERY brightly, nearby another fairly bright star. I thought it unusual that two abnormally bright stars were clusted together, so I fixed my gaze a little more. One looked to be simply a bright star. The light on the right (approx. WNW of the other one in view) side grew extremely bright, almost as though a gigantic flashlight was shining straight down toward me. I commented outloud for my wife to look, but she was busy constraining our child within the seatbelts (she doesn't really get into star-gazing much anyway). I never broke my gaze, from the moment it caught my eye. It grew very bright (almost pure white...brilliant) and then arced-off, for lack of a better description. It looked as though it 'rolled around' and I lost complete sight of the object. My best attempt at describing how it disappeared was that it looked like a very small eclipse. I verified that there were very few clouds in the area, if at all. The nearby 'star' on the left didn't change much throughout the whole ordeal (I suppose it was a true star). After it 'turned off', I quickly scanned the sky for reference points. From my best guess (sorry I'm not more specific) I would say that this observance was in the NW sky area. I saw the open 'scoop' of the Big Dipper point up toward the North Star and noticed that the light I clearly saw, was off-alignment, over toward the NW (as the scoop-alignment pointed off toward my upper left). This event happened off to my upper right. When we returned, and all during our driving time to and from our destination, I kept scanning the sky for any oddities. I saw none. Perhaps someone else in the middle TN area saw something similar? ((NUFORC Note: Date is approximate. PD)) |